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Rewarding teachers

Today’s article on performance based based pay by AGE education editor Farah Tomazin makes pretty good sense, despite a pretty broad basic assumption that performance based pay is, in fact, a good thing in itself. That’s debatable in the educational context I’d say. I did like this bit from the article:

There is no doubt about the need to offer successful teachers incentives to stay in the classroom, but the unanswered question has always been: how do you determine who the “good” teachers are.

For a start, teachers work in teams to improve students’ results. Then there is the fact that schools are socio-economically complex places. This makes it impossible to compare the performance of a teacher in, say, a middle-class, eastern suburban school with that of a teacher in a poorer western suburbs school.

Nor is student improvement easy to define: sometimes it’s as much of a challenge to keep students engaged in learning as it is to boost their grades.

This is a conundrum that is difficult to resolve and the Federal Government’s approach to the issue has been flawed.